Whole Foods Asks Shoppers to Consider a Value Proposition

WHOLE FOODS MARKET is fighting a two-front war: trying to reaccelerate its once-robust sales growth while fending off increased competition to sell its signature organic, natural and fresh products.

On Monday, the grocer is introducing what executives hope will be a powerful weapon: its first national brand marketing campaign, proclaiming that Whole Foods provides value to shoppers through the values it follows in deciding how to stock shelves.

The campaign continues a theme that Whole Foods already uses, “America’s healthiest grocery store,” and ushers in a new one, “Values matter.”

The ads — on television, in print, online, outdoors and in its 399 stores — are the first work for Whole Foods by a creative agency in New York, Partners & Spade, that produces campaigns for hip brands like Warby Parker, Shinola and Harry’s shaving products. Whole Foods executives announced during a conference call in late July, after reporting disappointing sales, that they planned such a campaign to start in the fall.

The budget for the campaign, scheduled to continue through the winter, is estimated at $15 million to $20 million. That would be far larger than what Whole Foods has spent on previous campaigns, which were focused on local and regional markets and mostly promoted products like the 365 Everyday Value line of private-label merchandise. According to Kantar Media, a unit of WPP, Whole Foods spent $4.5 million to advertise last year, with ad spending in the last five years ranging from a low of $4 million in 2008 to a high of $8.4 million in 2010.

The ads for the 365 Everyday Value label sought to dispel perceptions of Whole Foods as “Whole Paycheck” — a higher-price alternative to other supermarkets like Kroger and Walmart, which have begun filling their stores with wider arrays of natural and organic foods. The new campaign does not directly address the prices charged by Whole Foods, which may disappoint Wall Street analysts who recently suggested that the company ought to talk more about its prices, or reduce them further.

Rather, the ads suggest that value for money is as important as a bargain price if not more so, and that by shopping at Whole Foods consumers can be confident about where their food comes from and how it was grown, raised or made. As an announcer puts it in a commercial for Whole Foods beef, “To us, value is inseparable from values.”

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A new ad campaign from Whole Foods woos shoppers through the values the store uses in stocking its shelves.

The goal, said Jeannine D’Addario, global vice president for marketing and communications at Whole Foods in Austin, Tex., will be to assist shoppers to “make more meaningful choices” at a time when they “are hungrier than ever before for information about the food they eat.”

“We’ve been reducing expenses and passing along the savings” in the form of lower prices and “value offerings in every department,” Ms. D’Addario said, in an effort to make the Whole Foods brand “approachable” to those daunted by its high-price reputation.

“We’ll continue to work on providing more and more information around our value propositions,” she added. “This campaign communicates that value and values go hand in hand.”

That is conveyed in an anthemic, 60-second commercial in which an announcer declares: “We want people and animals and the places our food comes from to be treated fairly. The time is right to champion the way food is grown and raised and caught. So it’s good for us, and for the greater good, too. This is where it all comes to fruition. This is where values matter. Whole Foods Market, America’s healthiest grocery store.”

In the commercial for Whole Foods beef, the announcer offers details of the company’s practices, among them buying cattle “who’ve had room to roam” by “people with responsible ranching practices.” Similarly, in a commercial for Whole Foods produce, the announcer describes how its fruits and vegetables “support organic and sustainable farming” and are grown with “our ethical trade program.” Print ads — carrying headlines like “Eat like an idealist,” “Healthy food does good” and “Treat your body like it belongs to someone you love” — discuss issues like sustainability, philanthropy and “a growing consciousness that’s bigger than food.”

The Whole Foods campaign is an example of a popular trend on Madison Avenue known by terms like conscious capitalism, purpose marketing and pro-social marketing. The idea, to appeal to prospective customers by persuading them that a company operates in a socially responsible manner, is being pursued by brands like Chipotle, Kiehl’s and Panera Bread. Even McDonald’s is getting into the act, introducing in the United States last week a campaign that seeks to improve perceptions about its food quality.

Because “what Whole Foods has been doing for 35 years has brought a lot of other brands and companies along for the ride,” said Anthony Sperduti, the creative director of Partners & Spade, who founded the agency with Andy Spade, the campaign will seek to tell shoppers that Whole Foods was “doing it before” the others “and continues to push itself and go further than competitors.”

“I’d like to think that everyone having this conversation only helps Whole Foods because it is the leader in the movement,” he added.

The campaign is meant as “the first steps in a national dialogue,” Mr. Sperduti said. “The millennial generation, especially, wants to know how socially responsible a brand is and where products come from. We hope that’s just the new normal.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B5 of the New York edition with the headline: Whole Foods Asks Shoppers to Consider a Value Proposition. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe